The art of disillusionment

Ruthie and I had conversation last night regarding the reality of the thousands of people who have died from natural disasters in the past few weeks....with our country failing to blink an eye...and millions more left with crops and cities destroyed, family and friends lost---and life just goes on.  

There's always a part of me that strongly urges that I stop what I'm doing and go help.....that nothing matters compared to millions of people suffering from injustice...(key phrase here) that is recognized universally as unjust, and yet so many fail to blink an eye when people are need of 1. food 2. water and 3. shelter.  It's not deep--there are hardly 'systems' to fight...except getting up off your duff, doing a little research, and using some of your resources.  And somewhere I find myself struggling to reconcile my heart to fighting injustice that isn't the greatest injustice.  Like somehow it doesn't matter what injustice I'm fighting, if the greatest injustice is still left ignored.  What is that?  I know that life is of greater value than...well, everything else....but it is still strange to know I'm comparing levels of injustice....and, furthermore, feeling like I'm not fighting enough injustice.  Do you feel like those thoughts are rational?  They feel rational.

4-5 minutes later, while en route to visit a Kindergardener, I came to reconcile the fact that at the end of the day, I don't think our world is going to "turn" much longer...I don't find myself particularly hopeful about the world when I'm 85...and with that thought in mind, and given this recurring urgency...I find it necessary to have the conversation with you--my dearest friends--that we, as individuals and a whole, reconsider if our goals, our values are eternal.  At the end of the day, who are we helping outside of ourselves and our families?  Can we continue to reconcile the knowledge of injustice without action to stop it?  If we can, we should ask why.  Even if we don't take the extreme of giving all this up to fight that fight....how are we prepared to invest beyond our personal interests?  This is very important to me...and I feel as though I have a firm grasp on how difficult change is....but I know we are better than this disillusionment, this mediocrity that has infiltrated our cultures.  Blissful disillusionment is blissful disillusionment, regardless of whether you are a teenage mom or a crack addict or a christian college student or a university president or us....a choice.  

And once again I feel like part of me wishes those thoughts didn't seem so lonely.